Smartphone-oriented?

How many of you guys who don’t know what hand phone is? I guess I
can surely say that hand phone has become one of the important
parts of our life, and even some us cannot afford to live without
handphone. Nowadays, we are more likely not only talking about
hand phone, but most of us already use smartphone. Many
applications are offered in order to show us the easiness to do
something, especially to communicate. Whatsapp, LINE, KakaoTalk,
WeChat, iMessage – I’m sure we must have, at least, one of those
applications in our phones. Or if we make it wider, your phone
must be able to send short message service or SMS, because that’s
one of the most important points of its existence.

The presence of smartphones (including chatting and social media
applications inside them) makes us easier to communicate with
someone. It is free (because most of them are free-applications,
and all you need to actively use them is only internet
connection) and it is fast. Some people view this as efficiency.
I cannot say that that statement is wrong, but take a look at
this fact.

Some kind of communications – with different kind of
relationships also – somehow cannot work with indirect
communication. Parents and children, lovers, and best friends are
the examples of kind of relationships which cannot be successful
if we only count on this indirect communication. Indirect
communication is just the complementary methode of direct
communication. Direct communication becomes very important in
these intimate relationships because it shows the nonverbal
aspect of the communication. We somehow can feel the affection
and emotion directly through our eyes. We are emotionally
connected.

What about emoticon? Emoticon is emotion in icon, which the
objective is to help us show our emotion in text. However, you
still cannot be able to see the real truth. Media can be used
with manipulation – it is all up to the sender. So, it doesn’t
really help us, and it doesn’t have enough qualification to
replace the nonverbal aspect that we can see in direct
communication.

The sad part of this condition is most of us (finally) feel more
comfortable when we talk through media. In Indonesia, we know the
sarcasm sentence of smartphones, “mendekatkan yang jauh,
menjauhkan yang dekat” – or in English: taking the far one
closer, and making the closest one far. This is what happens if
we keep using the indirect communication only.

Again, I’m not saying that indirect communication is a really bad
thing and we should stop using it, because somehow we cannot
avoid the fact that smartphone is really useful for our life.
What I want to emphasize is don’t forget that indirect
communication is present to complete the direct one, so we also
have to do direct communication to maintain our relationships
with our closest.